Wireless and wired networks may be used to provide a wide variety of services to customers. For example, a telecommunications provider may implement networks that provide services relating to content delivery (e.g., streaming video and audio delivery) as well as other services, such as television programming, cellular wireless mobile data and voice services, and/or wired voice and data services.
Content may be delivered to customers of a telecommunications provider using content delivery techniques such as over-the-top (OTT) content delivery or content delivery that is more closely integrated within the underlying network. OTT content delivery may generally refer to content that is provided to users over a network in which the telecommunications provider delivers the content as a series of Internet Protocol (IP) packets that may be transmitted on a best-effort basis. Other content, such as video on demand (VoD) content, may be delivered using data streams that are associated with guaranteed bit rates and/or other guaranteed quality metrics.
For both OTT content non-OTT content, it may be desirable to encode or transcode the content into a number of different encoding formats. For example, a streaming video service may store different versions of a particular video program, in which each of the different versions encodes the video program using a different codec (e.g., a H.263/MPEG-2 codec, H.264/MPEG-4 codec, a Windows Media Video (WMV) codec, etc) and/or different parameters for the codecs (e.g., different bit rates or other parameters). Due to the potentially large number of combinations of codecs and parameters that may be desired for a particular video program, the particular video program may be associated with a large number of encodings.